OK… I’ll tell the true story… the history of
me and Burns Tri-Sonic Pickups...

When my Dad and I had my
original Red Special guitar nearly finished, at a total cost of about
eight pounds, I had designed and made three pickups for it. They were
made out of things that we had been able to find, just like the rest of
the guitar – in this case, three Eclipse button magnets
surrounded by coils of wire wound on a special winder Dad had made and
faced up with white Formica plates. The windings were terminated on the
two brass bushes that held the fixing screws …the brass bolts
that held the pickups into the body of the guitar. This meant that
there were no loose wires hanging around – every time a pickup
was screwed in, it was immediately in circuit. Well, the pickups
sounded really good, nice and crisp, just like the experimental one I
had put on my first acoustic guitar, and plugged it into my Dad’s
radiogram! And all the ‘in and out of phase’ switching
worked fine too – I took it into school to show my mates how the
sound could be varied… this switching arrangement had never been
used before.

But there was one
problem… when I bent a string, moving it sideways across the
pickups, a strange rustling sound was heard – like a kind of
scraping, as the string moved back and forth. I figured it was because
in my pickups the field alternated North-South-North-South moving
across the strings. Somehow this seemed to produce a kind of tearing of
the magnetic lines of force. Or so I thought. There seemed to be two
possible solutions, either cut up each button magnet into two and
arrange all the North poles to be together pointing upwards – or
try some other pickups. The first option was dificult… I had no
way of cutting such hard steel. (I blunted a few saw blades trying!) So
I went out in search of loose pickups. It so happened that I walked
into the new Burns showroom in the base of the new tower in St
Giles’s Circus – (very close to where our show We Will Rock
You would find its home nearly 40 years later!) I can still see the
rather fat man who sold me the pickups. In those days people who worked
in music stores were usually pretty scornful of young lads like me who
evidently didn’t have the money to buy their amps and guitars
– and this man was no exception. The way I remember it, he had a
bit of smirk as he took the money – a total of nine guineas, for
the three pickups.

As if to say, “Well
obviously you’re wasting your money, because the guitar
you’re making can’t be any good.” So suddenly my
guitar had cost nearly twice as much in total! I took them home
carefully in their paper wrappers.

I had to put special posts in
the guitar to anchor the wires, something I hadn’t wanted to do,
and hadn’t needed to do with my own pickups, but this had the
advantage that I could at least change the polarity of each one easily.
They immediately sounded good. I had lost the really sparkling clear
top, but the pickups had a warmth and ‘singing’ quality
which I instantly took to. That was it. They became part of my
guitar’s sound, and have been ever since. There was one more
piece to the story… when I held the guitar near the speakers at
high gain, they fed back in an unpleasant way – a high pitched
whistling noise – because of a microphony in the body of the
pickups. They fed back through this ‘microphone’, rather
than purely through the string, which is of course a pleasant thing to
happen, since it can produce a musical sustain, if things are set up
right – exactly what I wanted from my guitar – I wanted it
to ‘sing’.

I discovered that if I held
my hand on the pickup in question, which was feeding back at the time,
and stopped it from vibrating, the bad feedback was controlled. So I
decided to dampen the vibration in other ways, but inserting tape
between the casings and the magnets, and filling the air spaces in the
pickups with Araldite, to dampen the ‘microphone’ effect.
It worked pretty well, and now the pickups ‘sang’, with
‘good’ feedback, without any unpleasant whistling feedback.
These days I think filling pickups with wax is quite commonplace. I
think Burns must do it with their new issue pickups, because they
‘sing’ very nicely. We have always used Tri-Sonic Pickups
on the Brian May guitar issue models, and the quality is very good. My
“Commercial copy” guitars have been through various
incarnations… they were first made by Guild of America, and then
by Burns of England, and now we manufacture them ourselves, using
workshops in Korea. We have been able to gradually improve the quality
to the point where most of our We Will Rock You guitarists are now able
to use them “off the shelf”. Along the way we have used
pickups from various manufacturers made to replicate the

sound those original Burns
jobs made. Now we have returned to Burns, since they have begun making
them again… and very good they are too! All the new TBM guitars
are fitted with the recreated “Tri-sonic” pickups, and they
sing just right!

The sound of a Tri-Sonic
pickup is not like a standard single-coil pickup, or a double-coil
(humbucker) – it is some way in between. It has more warmth than
standard single coil pickups, so sings (feeds back) a little easier,
but it also has more top end, or crispness, than a humbucker, and does
not self-limit at high levels, because its inductance is smaller. We
figure that the ‘fatness’ which we like so much comes from
the fact that a Tri-Sonic seems to pick up vibrations from the string
over a longer distance measured along the string than a normal single
coil. Maybe this is because the casing is magnetic itself, and spreads
the magnetic ield. Well, whatever the reason is, they just have that
sound, which thanks partly perhaps to me, Vox AC 30 amps and various
treble boosters, has become a sound that many guitarists enjoy having
at their ingertips. The sound that makes chords keep their clarity, yet
sound big, and makes single notes go into smooth distortion and sing
like a bird. Burns Tri-Sonic Pickups do this!!

Cheers, Bri

GREG FRYER APPRAISAL FOR BURNS TRI-SONIC PICKUPS.

Greg Fryer has custom built Red Special guitars, pickups, effect pedals
and amplifiers for Brian May and is currently co-ordinating development of
several Brian May products. In 1998 Greg repaired and restored Brian's
famous Red Special guitar and is the only person to have ever completely
taken apart, examined and repaired the Red Special's original Burns Trisonic
pickups.

" It has been an interesting exercise to examine the new Burns Brian May
Trisonic pickups, and to compare their sound against the known quantities
of my own Red Special replica guitar and other well known Red Special
guitars. At first glance I was unsure what Burns' Korean pickup
manufacturers would achieve with the notoriously difficult to make
unconventional old pickup design that the vintage Trisonics are...what I
have found inside the pickup has been very pleasantly surprising and I have
also been impressed with their sound.

The heart of the Burns "Brian May" Trisonic pickup is a bobbinless
tapewound coil and a two piece vintage style isotropic magnet. The
unconventional bobbinless coil is a challenge for any pickup manufacturer,
and this coil is very neatly made. The two piece magnet tested at the upper
gauss strength range of vintage 1960s Burns isotropic magnets, with these
older style isotropic ferrite magnets giving a prettier more defined sound
to the pickup than the harder flatter sounding high output anisotropic
ferrite which is found in many modern pickups.

The new pickups do indeed have pleasant defined trebles similar to many
original 1960s Burns Trisonics that I have played, and produce a nice
dynamic attack when played hard. They certainly seem a little punchier than
some vintage Trisonics and this will probably appeal to many people.

Overall I would definitely recommend the new Burns Brian May Trisonic
pickups for people wanting a quality pickup to retro-fit to existing Brian
May guitars, and very soon we will look forward to these same pickups being
available as standard issue on the excellent Korean made Brian May Red
Special guitars."

Best wishes,

Greg Fryer, Fryer Guitars.

ONLY BURNS MAKE GENUINE BURNS TRI-SONIC PICKUPS.ALL OTHERS ARE UNAUTHORISED FAKES AND NOT MADE TO THE CORRECT SPECIFICATION.